Lessons in Cyber-Hygiene: How John Podesta was Caught by Phishing

Instead of a Hollywood-style cyberattack into an underground bank of highly secure servers, it appears Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta fell victim to a run-of-the-mill phishing email appearing to come from Google. On March 19, 2016, Podesta received an alarming email to his Gmail account indicating someone had accessed his account, inviting Podesta to click on a Bitly URL (a service providing shortlinks, or smaller URL addresses) pointing to a longer URL that looked like a Google link. According to Bitly’s statistics, the URL… Continue Reading

Lessons From a Presidential Campaign Data Breach

It was perhaps the first major allegation of a cyber breach in a presidential campaign when the Democratic National Committee (DNC) claimed that staff members from the campaign of Bernie Sanders accessed unauthorized information from a voter database maintained by DNC. The DNC leases this database to various campaigns and the campaigns supplement it with their own information. However, campaigns are blocked via firewalls from viewing information supplied by rival campaigns. In this case, members of the Sanders campaign are alleged to have accessed information… Continue Reading